Artist Exploration: A Studio Escape
A Virtual Reality Experience.
To earn the Public Digital Arts Certificate at Iowa you must pitch and complete an approved Capstone Project to demonstrate learned skills from courses taken. My peer Cat Dooley and I wanted to work more in Virtual Reality after only having a brief unit during one of the prior courses. After much discussion of our shared interests we decide to make a clean, interactive studio of our different dream art spaces. Cat worked on the photography and drawing studios while I worked on the Ceramics and Painting/Still-life rooms.
Above is a Video link to a view of our experience, and below is our presentation walking through our workflow and progress through our semester.
Early days learning how the builder side of Meta functions.
Cat finished our rooms with the drawing room. I did the same thing for the drawing room easel as we did with the painting room easel. We were starting to feel burnt out until we realized this room was our fastest to complete from the skills we has learned leading to this point. The only thing we ran out of time to complete was changing the chalk colors.
While in the planning phase we made multiple sketches and utilized YouTube tutorials learning their coding system.
We both are very proud of what we made and completed before our capstone was due. It being a self-lead project made us work on time management, and our goal made in our original pitch of the project were achieved.
I started building our rooms while Cat worked through some bugs and gave input while getting used to the controls. We very quickly became of a handful of limitations from Horizons as a program.
When we started filling up rooms, Cat and I discovered our different work styles and the Horizon server’s having a limit on Items.
As Cat worked she wasn’t caring for her first draft of the Photo room and reworked it entirely.
When she had the exact look she wanted, she spent a couple sessions working through coding moveable lights that can toggle on and off.
Starting on the Ceramics Room I had a very clear vision of how to approach it and the exact layout I desired. The coding of painting objects and learning the animation coding took a few sessions but made our following rooms much smoother of a process.
In the painting room we wanted to make a build your own still life and give a way to draw/paint on an easel. There is a given Interactive chalkboard object that had this precoded, it was easy to take apart and make it work on our canvases. The painting room is where we discovered that we were limited on the amount of objects allowed in our world.